


The Force Moves Darkly

by doctortatertots



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Rebellion Era - All Media Types
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Established Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Major Character Injury, Married Chirrut Îmwe/Baze Malbus, Pre-Canon, Spooning, spiritassassin 2017 exchange
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-03
Updated: 2017-04-03
Packaged: 2018-10-14 11:19:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10535397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doctortatertots/pseuds/doctortatertots
Summary: As the Empire encroaches on Jedha, Chirrut Îmwe faces the loss of everything he understands and everyone he loves.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [OrmondSacker](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OrmondSacker/gifts).



A young man stands before a class of Guardians-to-be in the basement of the Temple of the Kyber. 

“Before we move on to today’s lesson, I want to have a talk with you. This is something I discuss with every group of students your age,” he adds, “so don’t worry — you’re not in trouble.”

He smiles as he says it, and a few of his students laugh.

“How we fight is a beautiful art. However, we cannot ignore the fact that as each of you grows older, as you learn more and develop your skill, you will each develop the capacity to be very dangerous. To hurt others. From this moment, I want to make it clear to you that the ability to harm another living being requires you to hold within you an immense amount of grace and responsibility. The ability to take a life is a heavy and terrible power to possess. Never underestimate that power.”

“Master Îmwe?” a girl asks from the back of the room.

“Yes?”

“Have you ever killed someone?” 

He feels the whole room tense with the particular morbid curiosity that belongs to any gaggle of 12-to-14-year-olds.

“I have not. Thank the Force, I have never faced a danger so great that it left me with no other solution. And I hope, if the Force is willing, that I will never have to. Likewise, I hope that neither will any of you.”

He has always been an idealist.

The years pass.

The air within the temple is thick with fear. 

From where he stands in that same basement classroom alongside five of the youngest wards of the temple, he can hear shouting upstairs punctuated by blaster fire. His heart freezes.

“Master Îmwe, what’s going on?”

He doesn’t know how to answer.

Something tells him that they have nowhere to go to get out, not without putting the children in harm’s way. The oldest among them can’t be more than seven; they have no hope of fighting back. Pure instinct kicks in — he grabs his lightbow from a corner, slings it over his shoulder, and tells the children to run for the nearest cellar. He follows their fear and pushes aside his own, breaking with his staff anything that emits light along their path.

“Hide as well as you can,” he tells them as they reach the cellar and he blockades the door with every shelf and crate in arm’s reach. “Don’t move, don’t make a sound, don’t try to fight. Stay hidden and stay silent unless I tell you differently. Stay hidden, stay silent, and trust the Force. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Master Îmwe,” they answer in a quiet and terrified chorus. Once they’re safely out of the way, he shatters the lamp hanging above.

The room is dark as pitch, and so is the Force as it flows through Chirrut Îmwe. The fear coursing in him gives way, quickly and easily, to utter rage.

When he hears Imperial footsteps, he holds nothing back.

Time abandons him completely.

A few of his fellow Guardians find him tensed and panting behind a barricade of smashed furniture and white-armored bodies, his lightbow trained on the door. His knuckles, knees, elbows are all skinned and bloody, with splinters in his palms from where his staff has cracked and a burn on his bare left arm where it was grazed by blaster fire. And the children he guards are alive. He hears words — his body knows to trust them though his mind feels like mud. 

They each pick up one or two of the children and flee what was their home.

As they leave the temple behind, the voice of a young monk shouts his name, seemingly very far away although the boy is tugging his sleeve, lifting the child he carries from his arms. Through the fog of adrenaline, he comprehends a pair of words that finally brings him stumbling to a halt. 

Detonator. 

Malbus.

The minutes pass, and they don’t feel real.

“I am one with the Force and the Force is with me.”

He kneels at the side of a low cot, hands clasped together and resting gingerly against his love’s arm.

“I am one with the Force as it flows through all living things, and may the Force be with Baze Malbus.”

His love is breathing. If nothing else, his love is still breathing.

“May the Force give him strength in this time of injury and may it grant us guidance in this darkness. I am one with the Force and the Force is with me. May the Force be with Baze Malbus. May the Force be with my starlight.”

As his prayer lulls, he shudders remembering what he did. It happened so quickly. How swiftly his entire being gave over to that viciousness, how easy it was to leave none of his attackers breathing…it terrifies him. He has never been that angry in his life. He never knew he could be that merciless. That strong.

The full weight of everything that occurred that day hits him. How could the Force let this happen? How could the temple be taken from them? How many of his brothers and sisters are gone? How many of the children?

A sick feeling in the pit of his stomach wonders whether he brought this on Baze himself. He immediately tamps the feeling down; he tells himself that it’s a selfish feeling, that the Force does not punish, not in that way. He still can’t help wondering. Was there another way out? He was so sure that what he did was the only way, but was it his fear talking? Was it that rage that he can now never unknow? _Selfish_ , the voice in the back of his head says again. He clasps his hands tightly, each splinter stinging as he prepares again to pray.

“I am one with-” he begins before the feeling flares back up and chokes him. His words feel false as they dissolve into tears.

The hours pass.

He prays. He cries. Someone, a doctor, comes to check on Baze; he lets her take the splinters out and give him bacta for the angrier scrapes. She explains Baze’s condition and assure him that, if the Force is willing, he should be alright. He knows his fear won’t dissipate until his love wakes up.

The hours pass, and for a full day, he never leaves Baze’s side. Another half a day passes and he continues to pray. He doesn’t know what else he can do. Logically, he knows he should eat something; logically, he understand that his lower back is throbbing and he should find somewhere else to sit besides the floor, but those problems seem so unimportant. The steadiness of Baze’s breathing offers a small amount of comfort, but the future seems to have fallen apart.

His heart leaps into his throat when he finally feels Baze stir.

“Baze, I’m here.” He kneels upright and clasps Baze’s hand between his. He feels Baze turn to him and curl his fingers around one of his hands, groaning a little in the process. “Don’t move if it hurts you.”

“Chirrut…”

“I’m here.”

“The temple…”

Chirrut’s heart sinks again. “It’s been taken.”

Baze sighs and tightens his grip. Chirrut rubs his thumb over the back of Baze’s hand as the weight of his lost hope washes over him. 

“Are you in pain?” Chirrut asks.

Baze groans again. “I’ve been better.” Chirrut smiles a little. He’s at least well enough to still be a smartass.

“Apparently, you broke your hip.”

“I what?”

“Look…I wasn’t going to say anything.”

“My _hip_?”

“I wasn’t going to say anything.”

“What kind of old man nonsense - my _hip?!_ ”

Chirrut finds himself laughing despite the tears in his eyes. That’s his Baze. “Welcome to the ranks, grandfather.”

“Shut up.”

He keeps rubbing Baze’s hand as his laughter subsides, the heaviness of their situation flowing into the cracks of his brief moment of levity. They sit in relative silence for a minute, Baze occasionally muttering something along the lines of “Are you kidding me? Fucking _hip_.”

Chirrut steels himself and speaks, his voice on the edge of breaking. “Baze?”

“What’s wrong?”

“Will you be ashamed of me,” he begins, pausing to steady himself and blinking away tears. “Will you be ashamed of me if I tell you I have killed?”

“Oh, Chirrut…”

“We were trapped in the cellars. They-” He feels tears start to roll down his face. He inhales, exhales heavily. “They would have taken the children.”

Baze’s hand squeezes his. “Chirrut.” His voice is so soft. “Of course I’m not ashamed.”

That’s enough to make Chirrut start crying again. He leans his head onto his hands, intending to rest there until the tears slow down.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

He shakes his head and mumbles, “I don’t know what to say. Not now.”

“That’s okay.” After a pause, he adds, “How’s your back?”

Chirrut sits up, wiping his face with the back of one hand as he laughs. “The man is unconscious for more than a day, bits of shrapnel in half his body, his leg all but shattered, and he asks me about my back.”

“And?”

“It’s fine,” he lies. “Same as ever.”

“You shouldn’t be sleeping on the floor for my sake.”

_Who said I’ve been sleeping?_ Chirrut thinks. “Don’t tell me what to do, old man,” he says, smiling and running his free hand over Baze’s close-cropped hair.

Baze scoffs. Chirrut can hear his smile.

Baze’s hand tugs on his. “Chirrut, you’re too far away. Come here.”

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

“I’ll be fine. Come here, starlight.”

He lies down on the cot, gently resting one hand on Baze’s chest and stroking his hair with the other. He breathes in Baze’s warmth, suddenly overwhelmed with desperate gratitude for his safety. He’s not sure when, but Baze has started to cry, too.

“What are we going to do?” Chirrut asks.

“I don’t know,” Baze answers, his breath shaky as he turns his head and presses their foreheads together. 

Through his tears, Chirrut whispers, “I love you.” Baze softly kisses him.

Despite everything, they’re still together.

The years pass.

Chirrut watches his love grow bitter and reckless, as calculating, as skilled as ever but no longer picking his battles. He watches something similar happen to himself. Baze begins favoring heavier weaponry and all but abandons his hand to hand practice, unable to return to his former skill level after the damage to his leg. He says it’s a shame, but he doesn’t seem to mind his new reliance on blasters. The Empire’s cruelty awakened something in him, the same rage and mercilessness that Chirrut felt when the temple fell, that has run as a dim undercurrent through his own body ever since. Chirrut sometimes looks back with a strange nostalgia at the hopelessness he felt that day. He may no longer be that cornered animal that lost itself to brutality, but he also no longer balks at the possibility of killing when he has to. It makes him unspeakably sad, but what choice does he have? 

He watches Baze steadily lose his faith until the only words his love will speak on the Force are ones of condemnation and denial. Baze’s pain breaks his heart, but he does not begrudge him his cynicism too harshly. He can sense Baze’s feelings well enough to know that he feels betrayed. That he feels like a fool. How can he blame him?

His love becomes his husband and despite everything, they survive.

Every once in a while, in the middle of the night when neither of them can sleep, he feels Baze’s despair crash into him like a Jedha thunderstorm. He never says anything. He just pulls him close, burying his face in his soft, shaggy hair and silently promising to never let go.

“I’ve been hearing rumors,” Baze says one night from the bed they share in their rundown room on the outskirts of NiJedha.

“Oh? What about?”

“An evil spirit that haunts the remains of the temple.” Chirrut listens to Baze blow out the candle and settle back. “A handful of low-ranking Stormtroopers have been whispering about it to each other in Gerrera’s cells.”

“A spirit in the temple?” he asks nonchalantly, pulling on an old undershirt of Baze’s.

“Mm-hm. They say that the temple is haunted by some sort of dark specter with glowing white eyes. That it brutally slaughtered an entire 100-soldier company from the shadows of the catacombs all those years ago when they took the temple. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

“No idea what you’re talking about,” Chirrut says with a wry smile as he flops back onto the bed. Baze rolls onto his side, absentmindedly tracing his hand over Chirrut’s stomach and chest.

“I have to say, it was a difficult choice between living contentedly with the knowledge that swathes of Imperials are living in superstitious fear of something that doesn’t even exist and breaking the news to them that a handful of their compatriots were killed at the hands of an ordinary man.”

“Ordinary?” he asks with a tone of indignation.

“In a fruit cellar.”

“Come, now. I have a reputation as an army-conquering apparition to uphold.”

Baze laughs and squeezes Chirrut’s hip. “Come on, evil spirit, get under the blanket.” After he does, Baze wraps his arms around his waist and holds him close, kissing the back of his neck. “Chirrut?” Baze asks after a moment.

“Hm?”

“After that happened…after we lost the temple and you protected the children, you asked me if I was ashamed of you.”

“Yes?” It feels like a lifetime ago.

“What a hypocrite I would have turned out to be.” 

Chirrut squeezes his arm and they lie together in silence, under the weight of how far these years have pushed them. 

Baze’s voice is so tender when he speaks again. “After everything we’ve both done…I’m glad to still have you.”

The words hang in the cool night air for a moment.

“Hold me a little looser?”

“Okay. Why?”

Chirrut rolls over in Baze’s arms, laces his fingers into his hair, and kisses him deeply.

“I’m glad to have you, too.”

**Author's Note:**

> Fun facts:
> 
> 1\. This was written for the prompt "Protective Chirrut."
> 
> 2\. I couldn't think of a title for this work for the longest time, so for a while the unofficial title was NOT IN MY HOUSE.


End file.
